Business transformation deals with the strategic alignment of business and IT to deliver enduring on-demand value of continual business innovation and improvement. The latest industry trends suggest that business transformations can be best achieved by adopting a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). A SOA is a set of business-aligned IT services that support an organization's business goals and objectives by using interface-based service descriptions that decouple the provider and consumer of the service through open standards and protocols.
Adopting a SOA is a non-trivial task that includes many challenges. Some of the challenges are analyzing and modeling of business strategy and operations to drive business transformation, efficient generation of an IT solution from a business model using techniques from Model-Driven Development (MDD) of software systems, and monitoring and dynamic management of business performance for continual improvement.
Service-Oriented Analysis and Design (SOAD) is characterized as a holistic modeling and implementation discipline, which comprises an entire spectrum of modeling tasks that aim at systematically constructing SOA implementations. Some of the main requirements that characterize SOAD are that SOAD must facilitate end-to-end modeling, SOAD must be process-driven, for example it is centered around business process modeling with the goal to identify generic business services that are closely mapped to the business process model and SOAD must provide well-defined quality factors and best practices. Some elements of SOAD have already been developed, for example Business Process Modeling methodologies (BPM).
BPM approaches provide a business-oriented view on functional units of work, but they typically do not reach into the architecture and implementation domain. Modeling and development initiatives are separated from each other in BPM approaches. BPM can be considered as an emerging, but fragmented discipline with many different styles, notations and assets. BPM focuses mainly on creating AS-IS and TO-BE business process models from scratch without reusing existing model-based assets, such as existing or legacy business models and reference models. An AS-IS business model is a model that portrays how a business process is currently structured. In process improvement efforts, it is used to establish a baseline for measuring subsequent business improvement actions and progress. Whereas, a TO-BE business model is a process model that results from a business process redesign or reengineering action. The TO-BE business model shows how the business process will function after the improvement action is implemented.
Elements of a business-driven modeling process and an IT-driven design and implementation process exist today. Some elements of a top-down approach exist in BPM, but it stops when the TO-BE business process model has been derived. In particular, no use of business process reference models for the derivation of the TO-BE business process model has been established. The IT-driven design and implementation process also has top-down elements, but it does not link to the BPM space. Bottom-up elements, which ensure that existing legacy software is reflected correctly in a SOA project, are almost completely missing. The result of these gaps is a disconnection of business goals from the implementation.
Thus, there is a need for designing a process for SOAD, whereby the existing model-based assets are preserved, the business processes are improved and aligned with industry best practice process models and a top-down process is organized when reference models are to be applied in order to improve existing business processes.